How Should We Teach the Holocaust?

So, to combat what is being called a ‘rising tide of anti-Semitism’ in New York, the city has gotten together with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which calls itself a ‘living memorial to the Holocaust,’ to offer a day-long course about the Holocaust to eighth graders in the city’s public school system who will take a field trip to the museum to learn about this terrible event.

This museum shouldn’t be confused with the city’s Jewish Museum, located in the old Warburg-Schiff mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, which was founded in 1904. The Jewish Heritage Museum is located downtown near the tip of Manhattan Island and was founded in 1997 as both an educational effort as well as a storehouse where Jews could have artifacts from their families preserved and on occasion be displayed in the museum’s public space.

The Jewish Heritage Museum also shouldn’t be confused and has no connection with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum located several blocks south of the Mall in Washington, D.C.

The New York institution is also entirely distinct from another Jewish museum in D.C., the Capital Jewish Museum, a smaller and much newer institution than the Holocaust Memorial, which claims to connect up the Jewish experience as a subjugated and repressed race, with the treatment meted out to other American minority populations like American…